London 2012 Olympics: 24 'streams’ on just two hours’ sleep

With the BBC covering every second of every sport, this is the first viewers’
Olympics.

Matt Millington ought to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He is, after all, the BBC producer in charge of streaming 24 different Olympic events live and simultaneously on 24 different high-definition channels, all day every day, a broadcasting feat never attempted before.

To put this in perspective, broadcasters felt pretty stretched when they had to cover two matches simultaneously in Euro 2012 earlier this summer. And for the Beijing Olympics, the BBC managed to stream only six channels simultaneously.

Millington likens the job to being an air-traffic controller. “You are constantly landing planes, while clearing other planes for take off, and all the time you have a dozen more planes stacked in the air.

“The hardest day of my life was the Friday of the opening ceremony,” he adds, “because we did a dress rehearsal streaming three of the early football matches simultaneously. We were frantically trying to iron out every last crease before going live with 24 streams on the Saturday. It was pretty chaotic in here, lots of people running round feeling panicky.”

In the first few days of the coverage, he and his team were working 17-hour days, but when I meet him on Thursday, in the BBC’s Interactive Production Control Room at the Olympic Park, he says things have become easier as everyone now knows their job. “The second week will be easier still because there are fewer events to cover. I think we’ve got the balance about right, but we are working some of our commentators a bit hard. Some of them are suffering from sore throats from having to talk so much.”

Indeed. The 12-strong commentary team is said to be exhausted from its gruelling schedule. Mishal Husain who, with Clare Balding, has proved the BBC’s star turn this Olympics, has said she is running on adrenaline, getting in at 6am and off air at 11.30pm, only to start working on the next day’s schedules.

Millington and his team of seven editors, producers and sound engineers work in front of a gallery of nine large TV screens, each of which is divided into smaller screens, making 24 in all. As you scan them your eyes blur, taking in shooting here, judo there, cycling seemingly everywhere. In the bottom right-hand corner is the Olympic flame — what is known as “the beautiful shot”, which they can run between events if needed.

But what does all this mean for the viewer at home? Well, for most of us it has revolutionised the way we watch the Games. Indeed, this is being called the first “red-button Olympics”, the red button in question being that one on your remote that puts you, the viewer, in charge, selecting the sports you want to follow.

In the past, the BBC’s editors decided for you, with some sports such as long foil fencing going untelevised. Now, every moment of every event in the Olympics is being broadcast, which amounts to 2,500 hours of coverage — 1,000 more than from Beijing.

Slightly gallingly for the BBC, the main red-button platform is its rival Sky, which has 10 million subscribers. But Sky is only one way in which homes can access the 24-channel service. Combined with other satellite and cable platforms such as Virgin Media, Freesat and Freeview, most households are now covered, with 20 million viewers regularly tuning in.

And that figure doesn’t even include broadband. What they are finding with this Olympics is that 10 million people a day are watching the BBC’s coverage on the internet: the i-lympics, this is being called.

Millington shows me a computer behind his desk in the control room that has a graph constantly monitoring who is watching what and how.

“You get some surprises,” he says. “Look at this one. It shows that loads of people are tuning in to the fencing right now. And you find for marginal events such as volleyball, you might suddenly have 200,000 viewers.”

Millington, a lean, casually dressed 46-year-old whose face hasn’t seen a razor for a few days, is a keen cyclist himself, though his real hobby is tutting at people who annoy him. He sits at a “talkback” desk on which lights continuously flash, telling him which commentators are trying to talk to him at any given moment. “It becomes hard to concentrate when everyone calls in at the same time,” he says. “Some commentators don’t always introduce themselves, they will just start talking or they will say, 'It’s Matt,’ and you say: 'There are three Matts, which one are you?’ ”

What is striking as you watch them at work is how calm the atmosphere is. “If you’re not getting the pictures you are expecting or the sound isn’t coming through, you need people who will stay calm and speak to the right technician to get it sorted,” Millington says. “Things do go wrong, of course. Commentators are sometimes not aware their mics are still live when they think they are off air.”

On the wall behind him is evidence of a more normal, less hi-tech office: a wipeboard on which times and events are constantly updated by hand. There is also a photo of a straining female weightlifter on which someone has written “That’s my girl!” and, near this, a cartoon of an office worker saying: “I think I’ll go home, I’m a bit bored now.” There are, as you might expect, half a dozen mugs of coffee at various stages of being drunk.

On my way out I pass a room full of wires known as Spaghetti Junction, as well as more control rooms full of monitors. When I reach an open-plan office with a hundred computer screens, I meet Roger Mosey, the BBC’s cheerful director of London 2012.

He’s the man in overall charge; how is he sleeping? “Well, on the night of the opening ceremony I only got two hours’ sleep,” he says, “I think because of the adrenaline and because I knew what could go wrong with the ceremony. There had been reports of electrical storms, which would have meant having to delay the ceremony. It was also because I knew that next day we would find out whether the 24 streams would work.

“Distributing that many sports via satellite, cable, online, mobiles, tablets and everything else is a massive technological challenge that hasn’t been tried before. But we have been delighted with the way it has gone so far. Sports that wouldn’t have been given airtime before now have a following. And if you want to watch table tennis or sailing all day, you can. It has changed from something where we decide what is broadcast to the public deciding what they want to watch.”

I tell him that in my household it was my children who were the first to get their heads around the red button concept. “Yes, it comes naturally to the younger generation but we are finding that many older people are enjoying it, too.”

There were fears that the huge choice, including a new digital dashboard that allows viewers to build their own schedule of live and recorded events, would mean that the “story” of the Games would somehow be lost and that viewers would feel paralysed by choice. “But there have been no real complaints so far,” Mosey says. “In fact, our feedback is that viewers are loving it. We do these things called AI scores, which is where the public rate programmes. An average score will be 70, going up to, say, 92 for a David Attenborough, and we’ve consistently been getting 88, 89 for these Olympics. To get that from a reach of over 30 million people is unprecedented.”

There have been glitches, of course, as with the coverage of the cycling. “Yes,” he concedes. “Box Hill, where the cycling was taking place, is heavily wooded and that interfered with the signals. And that was compounded by the number of people on the course using their mobiles. But these were things outside the BBC’s control.”

His excitement about the games — and his relief that this big TV experiment is working — is palpable. He and his team have been planning 24 streams for the past two years: how does it feel now that he is seeing it in action?

“I don’t want to sound too soppy but this is turning into a genuinely unifying emotional moment for this country.”